Dear F.,
I saw you at the supermarket the other day. You didn’t see me. I was at the checkout. I saw you go by, you seemed to know what to look for. You always do. But I stayed there, in line, waiting for my turn. I didn’t come look for you. I knew I’d find you in the aisle of canned food, lost reading the ingredients of a bean soup. Trying to figure out nitrates and nitrites and calcium chloride. Looking up stuff on your phone. I wanted to call your name out loud, in the silence of the morning. We’ll make our own bean soup, I wanted to holler. No need to buy that canned garbage. No need to look up preservatives. Had I done that, you’d have gotten mad. Rightly so. And the situation between us would have worsened. The situation between us doesn’t have to get better or worse, you’d say. We’ve split. I can hear you say that. But time isn’t doing its job.
And so here I am, late at night, writing to you, while Paul Simon sings Some Folks’ Lives Roll Easy in the background. You know, there’s this mail I receive regularly, like twice a week, where a fortune teller does a card reading to me. My address must have ended up on some tarot-oriented mailing list. In fact, my address must have ended up on a bunch of mailing lists, as I spend most of my mail-reading time unsubscribing. I like the sense of cleanliness and tidiness and liberation and satisfaction, as well as the feeling of putting my affairs in order, when I click on that unsubscribe button. There’s joy in unsubscribing. Anyway, Eva -- that’s her name -- has been sending me these readings for a couple of years, and I haven’t unsubscribed yet. I guess I don’t want to. She clearly knows nothing about me, but keeps giving me great readings. Things I need to hear.
She says that a new beginning is around the corner for me, and that this new beginning will bring success and happiness. Who wouldn’t want to hear this? Who wouldn’t need to hear this? Most of her mails start with I’ve been thinking about you. She thinks about me, that’s why she feels the urge to do the reading for me. How considerate. Her last one came in yesterday. She says: I’ve reflected on the difficulties you’re facing and wanted to bring you a new perspective on your future with these special tarots. As you’ll see, the cards I’ve drawn for you evoke a new dynamic and show that things can still evolve by the end of the year! Sure, they might worsen, I thought right away.
Does the word “evolve” always imply a positive development? GPT says that it generally does, “however, in certain contexts or when discussing specific situations, ‘evolve’ might not inherently denote a positive change. [...] depending on the perspective or the nature of the transformation being discussed.” That’s what I thought. But then I figured that she wouldn’t title the mail “A reading of success and happiness”, had her reading not unveiled future positive developments.
She proceeds to show the five cards she’s drawn for me: the Sun, the Star, the Tower, the World, and the Wheel of Fortune. Now, I know nothing about tarots, but in the last two years I’ve learned that these are nice cards (their names generally evoke positivity even to the tarot-illiterate), except The Tower. Well, it’s not necessarily bad; it may be okay in a particular context. To this end, she continues: the Tower invites you to look toward the future. I know that, in the past, you've had to face some difficulties, and I understand how challenging it can be to recover. Yet, it's in the past that you'll find the keys to understand the future. Your life experiences are an inexhaustible source of tools to draw from. However, to do so, you'll need to learn to accept the future for what it is, with all its uncertainties.
As a fatalist, I’ve never had the presumption that I could mold the future. So yes, I do accept that the future is uncertain. That’s one of the few certainties that exist (the other two being taxes and death, they say). How else would I go about living? But it’s too complex a subject to tackle now. This is what Eva ends her mail with: the cards indicate that the situation could turn around by the end of the year. Indeed, the World represents a significant advancement in your life. It heralds a period of prosperity where you'll finally feel happy and fulfilled. It also hints at the presence of a woman by your side, someone you can count on.
Prosperity, happiness, and fulfillment -- I think it’s hard to have all three at the same time. Kenneth Koch encapsulated this idea in a poem titled “You want a social life, with friends”, where he says “What’s true is of these three you may have two, and two can pay you dividends, but never may have three.” Per his own words, “these three” are 1) a social life, with friends, 2) a passionate love life, and 3) to work hard every day. Which, to me, aligns with the trifecta Eva wishes on me. So, if I could only have two together, which two would I pick? I couldn’t do without happiness, hence the other one’s got to be either prosperity or fulfillment. I guess I’d go with fulfillment, which implies that I like what I do and what I do allows me to live decently. Not prosperously, but decently. And that’s enough. I couldn’t stand being prosper doing something that sucks.
But Eva says I will have all three! Can you believe it? I think I’m a little scared of that, cause I have a theory of life, which is that everything eventually evens out. This idea of “reversal to the mean”. And so after a period of prosperity, happiness, and fulfillment, to return to the mean I will have to undergo a period of poverty, sorrow, and dissatisfaction. Do I want that? Or would I prefer a life that consistently hovers around the mean, with small detours and a brief spike once in a while? Well into my fifties, I’ve been on life’s roller coaster, and continue to be. And I can confirm that -- based on personal empirical evidence -- my theory of life’s mean reversal holds true, in the long run.
Also, this woman has been a recurring presence in her readings. Someone I can count on. I don’t think that’s you. In fact, I can’t count on you. I’d love to, but I can’t. If it were you, I’d probably not be writing this letter now. So it seems there might be a woman somewhere, waiting to emerge onto the scene. Other readings said that this woman has an important role in my life. I suspect she must be someone familiar to me.
Why am I writing this to you? You know I’m at peace with myself, and I love my solitude. But sometimes I wish I still had you around to share some nonsense and laugh and joke and fantasize. Or be idle and silent. Borrowing some beautiful yet effective words from Mavis Gallant, “what I crave is not love, or romance, or a life added to mine, but conversation, which is harder to find.” She goes on to say: “The impetus of love -- of infatuation, rather -- brought on a kind of conversation I saw no reason to pursue. A remark such as ‘I can’t live without you’ made the speaker sound not only half-witted to me but almost truly, literally, insane.” I don’t think this idea could be expressed any better.
Conversation is hard to find. Real, spontaneous, genuine conversation. Conversation is comfortable silence, grace in just being, and enjoying the energy of presence. No pressure to say, no pressure to replicate. No awkwardness.
You know when you’re walking down the street and stumble on someone whom you haven’t seen or talked to in ages, and you stop and say hi and how long has it been and time flies and how are you? But after a few minutes you’re done and say goodbye and they’re going in the same direction as you and you’re walking side by side with them for a while saying nothing, maybe slightly turning your head toward them with a feeble smile every now and then? It happened to me many times and I’ve even faked a destination once or twice to escape the awkwardness. Like, uh, I’ve arrived. See ya. And I disappeared into a store or the entrance of a building. I even thought of going up a tree, once. But she magically vanished and I didn’t have to. You know what I’m talking about?
I could walk miles in silence with you.
"Unsent Letters" is a new series released every other week. These are imaginary letters penned (though never dispatched) to individuals who have influenced my life, not always mirroring actual events. Some entries contain elements of autofiction, while others are based on reality. However, I won’t specify which is which.
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I am in love with this new literary device you have invented. Unsent letters. Brilliant. It immediately anchors your always delightful insights in the context of story. With your permission I am going to borrow the convention for a storytelling practice session. Looking forward to where this goes. Or where you go. But hopefully not up a tree. :)
What a line to end with! I keep loving this series, Silvio.